State aid cuts to
small towns right on principle
From thnt.com Online,
March 4, 2008
To any outsider, New Jersey's more
than 500 municipal governments look ludicrous: reason for both its
longtime political fraternalism and its high property taxes. State
scholars and governors agree. The list of pundits, panels and academics
who over the years have advocated getting rid of pint-size municipalities is
long. They all have been routinely ignored.
In many respects Gov. John S. Corzine's proposal to offer incentives to small
towns to merge, and then to ax state aid if they don't, is therefore overdue.
New Jerseyans have every right to self-governance, but the state is under no
obligation to subsidize that choice.
Alas, the issue is more complicated, both philosophically and financially.
If New Jerseyans hate their property taxes, they love the municipal governments
that assess them, or at least they love the notion of those governments.
For reasons not entirely clear, New Jerseyans seem to view self-governance — as
opposed, say, to favorite haunts and recognized borders — as crucial to a town's
identity. Story after story has shown that people believe that by merging
governments they will not simply be merging the services many pay little if any
attention to — garbage collection, snowplowing, permit processing, for example —
but also will be forfeiting their sense of place, of who they are and where they
come from.
Corzine's proposed cuts — halving aid to towns with fewer than 10,000 residents,
cutting it completely to those with fewer than 5,000 — have hit this nerve, and
if the uproar in their wake is any indication, the cuts will not make it out of
the Legislature in their present form. Maybe that is a good thing.
After all, eliminating a town's state aid in a single year is terribly tough and
is as likely to lead to huge property tax hikes as it is to merged services.
At least one legislator has opined that the cuts ought to be done over a
five-year period. Three might be a better number, but the idea is the
right one.
That is not to say that Corzine isn't right on principle. For too many
years, governors have spoken of municipal mergers without doing anything to make
them happen. Corzine's approach is admittedly draconian; but if all other
matter of incentives have failed, what else is there? And the state ought
not fund what its experts have decried.
It should be noted, though, that a study done several years ago determined that
smaller municipalities actually get less state aid, as a percentage of their
budgets, than larger towns. One could argue that large towns have no more
right to state aid than small ones, that all municipal government services
should be paid for at the local level.
That, of course, raises the same old specter of the property tax. State
aid is intended to blunt property-tax hikes. But if the state is out of
money, municipalities have just one place to go to make up the difference — the
property-tax base. The renewed pressure on property taxes signify, once again,
how necessary and overdue true and sweeping tax reform is.
On a simpler note, Corzine's plan to have small towns pay for their use of state
police for municipal police services may be both necessary and objectively
right. But it also negates his larger point. After all, small towns
are doing their taxpayers a favor by forgoing a municipal police force and, in
effect, using merged services. While they certainly need to pay for those
services, they ought not to be discouraged from using a state-run source that is
both effective and financially prudent.
(Posted 3-3-08)
|
